Guest Column - Charlotte Church: "I wanted to make future music"

Charlotte Church releases her new album Four next Monday (10 March). The singer, who plays London's Riverside Studios tonight (5 March) has given us this track, Little Movements as an exclusive preview from the record, and to go with it she's written Q this guest column explaining how the track came about.

I wanted to make future music on this record, and Little Movements is one of the best examples of this. It's like a cartoon, big and bright and colourful, but it's also a product of us pushing what we can do with a band in the studio. We tracked the basics of it live, and stayed pretty true to the first ideas that we had when we brought it in for arrangement. The 'kaleidoscopic complexity' section used to sound a little more like Millionaire by Kelis, we added horns to bring a bit more of a party vibe, and the robo-vocals which we did to try to bring out this 'understanding humanity from outside' theme; I was thinking of Wall-E, that sort of naive alienation. Other than that we didn't pull it about too much, which is rare!

Little Movements was written in the same sessions as the material for Three, but didn't find a home on that record. After we made Two I realised that we needed a pair of drummers live, which was a great decision! We brought that line-up into the studio for Three and carried it through for Four, so that combination of electronic and acoustic drums was available to us. That, coupled with the bass part initially being arranged on a guitar, made for a pretty flexible palette and meant we felt free to change the sound of sections quite drastically.

It's quite tricksy. The drummers trade who's leading, the bass trades with the synths which also trade with the horns etc. The guitar sets the tone of each section. At the beginning it's these lovely pooling chords, then it tightens up and becomes really rhythmic before it opens back out again. I get to sing in a bunch of different registers and styles, which is pretty fun. The ending is built of versions of what we called 'superhero moments' in rehearsal, basically lots of slightly flash fills.

They're toned down quite a lot from where they started as it was all getting a bit excessive; it's dangerous to just let musicians off the leash taste-wise! But pushing against being tasteful was important. The whole idea of the song is that it should be like a sugar-rush; it's about noticing all the tiny things that make up the person you love, and how electric that feeling is. That meant that I felt free to be a bit garish with the arrangement, to show happiness in primary colours.
Charlotte Church@charlottechurch